Microsoft now sees many masters in our digital future

It's very likely you have a smartphone. But is your second device an iPad-like tablet or a more traditional PC? Or perhaps you have a laptop-tablet hybrid.Farhad Manjoo | New York Times | October 26, 2015, 10:37 IST

NEW YORK: Close your eyes and imagine it's five years from now.Now, check your pockets and your desk. Which devices are you using?

It's very likely you have a smartphone. But is your second device an iPad-like tablet or a more traditional PC? Or perhaps you have a laptop-tablet hybrid, like Microsoft's Surface? Or maybe you don't own a second device, because your phone is powerful enough. Or you might have everything, because that's how you roll in our hypothetical future.

OK, open your eyes and get back to the present. If you had any trouble choosing, you have a taste of the dilemmas facing Apple, Google and Microsoft, the three players waging an epic battle for the future of computing. Technology now allows for lots of powerful, compelling computing devices in a wide range of sizes and shapes. Just about everyone in the industry believes the smartphone will remain the dominant computing device for the foreseeable future. But second place looks entirely up for grabs, and the giants are jockeying to make that one other device that we'll all use along with our phones.

Apple has the iPad and the Mac, while Google has Android tablets and its Chromebook line of webcentric laptops.

But the most interesting new addition to the game is Microsoft, suddenly re-energised after suffering a long decline in the personal computer business.

Under Satya Nadella, who became Microsoft's chief executive early last year, Microsoft is embracing a fragmented vision of the future, in which no single device, or even a single category of devices, reigns supreme. The plan is a bit crazy and rife with internal and external tensions. That doesn't mean it can't work. The future is unpredictable, so why not try a bunch of good stuff and see what sticks? At a recent news conference that electrified not just Twitter but even some people in the real world, Microsoft wowed its loyalists (yes, there are Microsoft fanatics) with a number of new products that exemplify this idea.

I've been using two of them the Surface Pro 4, a tab let-PC hy brid that starts at about $1,030 if you in clude a keyboard cover, and the Surface Book, a $1,500 laptop with a screen that can screen that can be jettisoned to become a tablet for the better part of a week.

On the whole, I found them to be very nice. But is either one good enough to be that one other thing that most of us will want in a smartphone-dominated future? Well, that's the twist. The more I used Microsoft's new machines, the more I thought that perhaps no single kind of device is destined to win the war for second place to the smartphone. Perhaps the very idea that there will be a secondplace winner is a mistake.

What if the future of computing is chaos? We'll have smartphones and then a dizzying array of desktops, laptops, tablets and hybrid devices -and different people, for different reasons, will choose different sets of each.

Microsoft's devices -and in a larger sense, Nadella's strategy -anticipate such chaos. For much of its history, Microsoft was mainly a software company. It made Windows, the OS that became the lingua franca of the PC era, and it made Office, the software that made those Windows machines useful to businesses.

Microsoft's new plan is to still make Windows and software for Windows, which it licenses to other hardware makers for their machines -but now it also makes its own phones and Surface devices, and it makes applications for iOS, Apple's mobile operating system.

No other company in the industry operates quite this expansively.Apple makes hardware and software, but just about all of its products are integrated; Apple's software works on Apple's hardware, and in most cases nowhere else.

Google makes the Android and Chrome OS that it gives away free to other companies, and it also makes a handful of Nexus phones and tablets. The modern Microsoft breaks all these rules: Its Surface devices compete with PCs made by other Windows hardware makers.